Stimulus

[SolaSaint]

If you take the 1.3 Trillion dollar stimulus Obama pushed through and his proposed 447 Billion dollar stimulus and divide all this money by all the families in America it comes to somewhere around $20,000.00 for each family. Instead of shovel ready jobs, green jobs, etc. If every family had 20K extra to spend, wouldn't that have lifted our economy?

 

[preachinjesus]

Some people have been saying this since the first stimulus under President George W Bush.

I'm not completely certain I agree, though giving some money back to working families would have been huge. A lot of the problems that led to the near capsizing of our economy came from badly leverage banks that were hemoraging capital. Granted some of them (more of them) should have been left to fail. Also the corporate bailouts of GM and such were difficult to justify.

I can't help but imagine if the American public was given half that amount, $10,000, per family (which is complicated) how much better would our economy have been? We probably wouldn't have double dipped, but the unemployment rate would be higher (maybe.)

The whole economics of the recovery are complicated, the mass of "funny money" debt that crippled the large financial institutions is largely unseen. But I don't deny that giving each tax paying citizen $10,000 is a bad thing given the scope of the bailouts (particularly the unnecessary ones) over the last several years.

The two wars didn't help either. Imagine all that extra capital being available for a new civilian works corp. We could have fixed our looming water system crisis by now...across the US.

 

[InTheLight]

If you take the 1.3 Trillion dollar stimulus Obama pushed through and his proposed 447 Billion dollar stimulus and divide all this money by all the families in America it comes to somewhere around $20,000.00 for each family. Instead of shovel ready jobs, green jobs, etc. If every family had 20K extra to spend, wouldn't that have lifted our economy?

And cause galloping, rampant inflation. If every family in America suddenly had $20K extra walking around money, every store owner in the country would raise prices through the roof.

(I presumed you were being serious)

I think a more sensible approach would be to issue a government backed credit card loaded with $1,500 to every U.S. taxpayer(individual or joint) with the stipulation that it must be used to purchase goods and/or services AND it expires in 90 days. Use it or lose it. You could not use this card to pay off existing debt. You could not exchange this card for cash. (though there might be a discount black market for this, oh well...)

 

[Jon-Marc]

I know that $20,000 would get me out of debt and leave a lot left over to leave in my bank account and use as needed.